Trying to find your lowland family? A flood of online records from the Netherlands is sure to help you out.

The Netherlands is a low-lying land where levees and water-pumping windmills have worked for 500 years to keep the sea at bay. Flooding from the fierce North Sea has been a constant threat, to which the Dutch have responded by becoming some of the world’s best hydraulic engineers.

Now the Dutch have a new flood on their hands—but this one’s good. Far from stemming the tide, technology is generating a deluge of Dutch genealogical records that have now become accessible by the millions. Of course, the age of the internet is making all genealogical records more accessible—what’s so different about Dutch digitization?